Boss Hanoi Hotel

... chatting to James and another guy called Olly who I soon discovered was also doing the three-day Ha Long Bay trip tomorrow as I was. There was also a nice Swedish girl called Ulrika, and her friend, also Swedish, called Anna. The restaurant's menu was stupidly long, and took a good ten minutes to browse through, but of course the waiters were hovering within one minute of handing it over, evidently presuming we possessed super-human reading abilities. We finally all ordered ...

Tuesday 20th October - Hanoi

Bleary eyed we were kicked off the bus on the outskirts of Hanoi Old Town. A tout came up to us and offered a hotel for a reasonable price which we accepted. Once we got to the place we were ushered into the back room under the main staircase that was a bit damp and had no natural light. Too tired to do anything about it we decided to sleep first and find somewhere better later in the day. On the streets later in the morning we were suprised at ...

... ends the story of how the police make all their money, and the corruption within the police dept.

Now for my leg and what’s happening with it.

So, for the first two days after the accident my leg was sore but tolerable considering a bike fell on it and I had sizeable gash. Then yesterday I noticed that the swelling was not going down in fact it seemed just the opposite. And my entire foot was now turning purple and I was starting to feel pretty much ...

... chapeau conique vietnamien tenu par un foulard. Ou encore un participant chevronne non pas a 2 rous mais a 2 plateaux qui amene le piment indispensable a cette sarabande infernale : le porteur ambulant avec ses 2 plateaux en equilibre de balancier sur l'epaule. Un chapeau conique, fruits ou oeufs brinquebalants dans ses plateaux et la voila dans la cohue.

Sa prestation a lui, n'est pas celle du 1er role motocyclette mias bien du saltinbanque qui donne a ce spectacle toute sa croustillance!

... you with questions about school: our school day starts at 8 and ends at 5 with teaching part of the day occurring from 8:30 – 4. We do have duty but not everyday and we get an hour for lunch and can leave the grounds without having to tell anyone. I mentioned the free cappuccino daily if we like and I do, and water coolers are throughout the school for dinking at no cost. If you buy a school lunch it is very cheap (about 75 cents), regarding days off - we get 4 weeks off, one ...

... hotel just round the corner. Turned out it was brand new and quite plush for our $20 a night. We felt as though we’d had an upgrade, which was nice. Hotel rooms aside, we had a few days left in the city before my parents headed home and we headed south. We kept ourselves pretty busy though visiting some more sights etc. We visited a couple more museums. One was Hao Lo Prison, notorious from the Vietnam war for keeping famous POW’s, such as John McCain, not that you’d ...

... br>
We talked for a few minutes and then decided that we would join them for a beer or two, so we went to their guest house to collect the other American before setting out on our bar finding mission. It took a while to find a place that wasn't obnoxiously loud, closed, or a night club, but we finally prevailed in a newly opened place called Studio. It was really trendy looking, and Cory and I thought that we shouldn't go in because trendy generally equals ...

... or bicycle. Hairy times! We made it to the Temple and our driver said he'd wait. The Temple of Literature was where Confucius (famous scholar plebs) taught and was the first University in Vietnam. The grounds are picturesque, with a number of courtyards including ponds and pagodas. The temple at the end has statues of some famous teachers in Vietnam, real educational revolutionaries. I think we'd come during the middle of four consecutive school trips as we were overrun by school ...

... huge headlamps on, blinding me in the process, and chatting to us in the local dialect. The older guys stayed about 5 minutes, happy to know that we were responsible, older, foreigners. The younger ones decided our fire was pathetic, so, in one fail swoop gathered up a whole load of bamboo and wood (they weren't quite as sensitive about ownership as we were), and whoooosh, we had a bonfire. Thanks guys. We think they just came to check us out, they had ...

... a long palm and sandy beach, a beautiful park and some islands in front that I visited in a day excursion paying about 6 dollars for trip, seafood, cocktails, dance and a lot of fun. We visited three islands, one is the monkeys island where about 3,000 animals live, another has one elephant, some deers and a little lake, another a nice beach and a modern aquarious in an Antoni Gaudi style building. The last stop was Mui Ne, another sea-side resort ...